The Nastiest Race?

Ayotte is sitting in the backroom of the Macomb County Republican headquarters, having flown in that morning to campaign with Terri Lynn Land, Michigan’s Republican Senate candidate, who has had difficulty closing what is now a 9-point deficit. Land shakes her head and confirms that the accusations that have left Ayotte speechless are true.

For months now, Land’s Democratic opponent, Rep. Gary Peters, has been attacking Land on the grounds that, contra every modern cultural norm, she’s not an equal financial partner in her own marriage. Land and her husband have a reported net worth north of $30 million, and they’ve put $3 million of their own money into the campaign. “I work, he works, and we both put money in a joint checking account,” Land tells Ayotte in her flat Midwestern accent.

However, the Peters campaign is charging that, because her husband earns most of the money, Land’s campaign is engaged in some sort of shenanigans, even though joint accounts aren’t restricted by campaign finance limits. The Democratic accusation is that while Land’s husband was bringing home the bacon, Land was busy doing such trifles as raising two kids and twice being elected Michigan’s secretary of state. Therefore, she’s not entitled to spend her husband’s millions.

In an era when refusing to subsidize a $10 package of birth control pills is deemed by liberals to be just shy of a war crime, the accusations directed at Land are a reminder of what a genuinely sexist campaign attack looks like. Nonetheless, the media have been happy to amplify Peters’s press releases with headlines such as “Gary Peters calls on Terri Lynn Land to disclose husband’s tax returns, details of $3M in funding” at MLive.com.

Indeed, it seems there’s nothing Land’s money won’t taint. In September, the Huffington Post ran this shocking exposé: “Terri Lynn Land Family Gives Millions To Evangelical Group Targeting ‘Unreached People.’ ” Land and her husband have donated a lot of money to support Christian missionaries in Africa, which HuffPo spins as “Land seeks to deflect attention from her wealth.”

Dig through the clip file, and you keep finding dire warnings about Land’s plutocratic excesses. “Michigan GOP Senate candidate Terri Lynn Land used her family’s company as the site for dozens of official meetings while she was the Michigan secretary of state, according to newly released records,” leads an October 15 Politico report. A few paragraphs later we get the requisite disclaimer: “Land does not appear to have violated any Michigan laws or ethics rules with these meetings.” A Michigan Democratic spokesman is nonetheless quoted asking “what she’s hiding about her shady relationship with Land & Co.”

The Politico piece finally caused Ken Braun, a conservative columnist for MLive.com, to snap. “The meeting schedule exposed by Politico means that roughly once per month top level staffers were required to leave behind their stuffy state office building and its Soviet-inspired architecture and visit instead a location where wealthy people work,” wrote Braun.

While dispatches of Land’s wealth abound, Peters—who, by the way, is a multimillionaire stockbroker—has evaded similar scrutiny. In December 2012, Peters hired Kandia Milton as a liaison in his congressional office, and Milton worked in Peters’s office for much of last year. Milton is the former chief of staff for imprisoned Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, and was fresh out of the big house for taking a $20,000 bribe in exchange for expediting the sale of city property.

Some might question Peters’s decision to place the public trust in a man convicted of public corruption. But the media spied a different angle: “Congressman Peters gives Kandia Milton a second chance” was the headline at Detroit’s Fox station. “I’m a Christian, and I believe in redemption,” Peters said of the unusual hire.

Of course, nearly all GOP candidates face a hostile media environment. More than a few Republicans have publicly and privately said that Land just isn’t a strong candidate. The bad-candidate narrative was cemented in May, when Land ran away from a scrum of reporters saying, “I can’t do this. I talk with my hands.”

Heather Swift, Land’s brassy flack, gets indignant when asked about the incident. “They were shoving microphones into her throat.” The campaign further says it was rebuffed when it asked for the footage of the event from a Detroit TV station, and it seems odd that the video of such an allegedly pivotal event has never surfaced. Since then, Land has spent a lot of time intentionally dodging the press.

From the campaign’s perspective, Land is damned if she talks to the press, and damned if she doesn’t, so at least they can deny them the satisfaction. The campaign had plans to meet with every paper in the state, but after a Detroit Free Press columnist declared that Land had been avoiding reporters like “a music video diva recovering from plastic surgery,” the campaign skipped the paper’s endorsement meeting and accused it of “gaslighting” the sexist attacks on her.

Land’s discomfort with campaigning seems to have been exaggerated. She appears at ease stumping, even if she’s not going to win any blue ribbons for extemporaneous talking point recitation. She spends much of her stump speech hitting local issues such as student loan programs for vocational training and EPA regulations hurting farmers. Denunciations of Obamacare are always popular. One woman at the Macomb County GOP event waves her hands wildly to indicate she lost her insurance as a result of the president’s broken promise.

Many observers have also conceded that Peters isn’t going to win any laurels for a vibrant and dynamic candidacy, either. The real rap on the Michigan Senate race is that it’s boring by the standards of modern political drama. There have been no debates—neither campaign could decide on a format—and it’s attracted very little national press coverage.

The campaign was a dead heat through the summer before Peters started pulling away, thanks to lots of spending from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and organizations backed by liberal billionaire Tom Steyer. Not coincidentally, the Land campaign was spending more back when the race was tighter.

Then in early October, the National Republican Senatorial Committee announced it was pulling $850,000 in ad buys in the final weeks of the campaign. This was widely interpreted as a signal the national GOP was throwing in the towel. Normally, such a close race wouldn’t be abandoned. But Republicans have so many pickup opportunities this year, their resources are spread thin. Some unlucky candidate had to draw the short straw.

But it’s not over until it’s over. In a recent article in the Atlantic, Democratic insiders conceded the race is tighter than polls suggest. Obama is set to make a rare campaign appearance at Peters’s side before the election. A presidential endorsement is toxic in much of Michigan, so the Peters campaign must be worried about turnout among black voters in Detroit.

The Land campaign recently sent out a memo arguing that the race has been closing and that it’s really only 3 points behind. This is not unreasonable spin given national Democratic headwinds. And fortunately for Land, Michigan’s Republican governor is up by 8 points, according to the latest poll. They’re hoping, not implausibly, that his coattails may drag Land across the finish line just ahead of Peters. (If that happens, expect a Democratic press release accusing her of capitalizing on a man’s success.)

Land has clearly been through the wringer. But there’s a steely reserve that comes out as she tries to pick apart the irony of being a female candidate who finds herself on opposing sides of the War on Women, depending on the news cycle. She’s proud of her actual governing experience. While secretary of state, she started the Lead Worker program to train state employees, especially women. “Whenever management jobs would come up, I would look at some of the women in the office and they were really good and I’d say, ‘Why don’t you apply?’ And they’d say, ‘Well, I don’t know how to do that job,’ ” she says. “I thought, ‘Let’s teach you how to do the job.’ ” Sure enough, Land left the secretary of state’s office with more women in management positions than when she started. It’s not as, well, sexy as free birth control—but it’s the sort of thing likely to make a real difference in women’s lives.

Still, there’s a lingering sense Land hates what she’s had to endure these last few months, even as she insists she believes in what she’s doing. If that’s what makes her a bad candidate, it certainly doesn’t make her unworthy or unqualified to be the next senator from Michigan. “You’ve got to have a thick skin for this. But the issues are more important, when you think about your kids, and the direction of our country, it’s just more important,” she says. “You can’t sit back. You’ve got to get involved.”

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.